


Negative Capability

by soundofez



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: (Black Star), (Wes Evans), (i'm not sorry), Angst, Character Death, F/M, I'm Sorry, Tags Contain Spoilers, poet AU, sorta?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 17:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7650151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundofez/pseuds/soundofez
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maka Albarn refuses to allow social expectations prevent her from doing as she pleases. In this interest, she scraps with men, and studies medicine with men, and writes poetry like men.</p><p>Soul’s parents are scandalized at Maka Albarn’s trousers and mannish hair. Soul and Maka get along beautifully.</p><p>[heavily inspired by the film Bright Star]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Negative Capability

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by John Keats/Bright Star. if i've done my job right, you shouldn't need to know anything about them, though.
> 
> DISCLAIMER: many scenes have pretty obvious film parallels, and a chunk of the dialogue is ripped straight from the movie. the direct quotes will be made explicit in the end notes.
> 
> [[older tumblr version](http://soulofez.tumblr.com/post/121556387179/)]

“Soul, I don’t see why you have to be so difficult about this! Just pick a girl and give your poor parents some grandchildren to love!”

Solomon Evans is unimpressed. “And where am I to find happiness in a girl picked for her childbearing capacity and not our compatibility?” he grumbles softly, crossing his arms as he leans against a windowsill.

Missus Evans makes a sound of frustration. “In your children, of course!”

Yes, because he brings his parents so much pleasure. Soul sighs internally. He knows children are expected of him, but increasingly he questions his capacity to raise them properly, nor is he especially enthused at the prospect of inflicting his own parents upon them.

* * *

Blake Stanton is obnoxious and loud and scrappy, but despite his and Soul’s differences, they get along alright. They were neighbors as children, and now exchange not infrequent letters while Blake is in law school mucking about.

Blake writes often of a Maka Albarn, yet in all his correspondences neglected to mention that his infamous bosom friend is a woman.

Soul’s parents are scandalized at Maka Albarn’s trousers and mannish hair. Soul and Maka get along beautifully.

Maka Albarn refuses to allow social expectations prevent her from doing as she pleases. In this interest, she scraps with men, and studies medicine with men, and writes poetry like men.

Her childhood was idyllic, if she discounts how her Papa cheated on Mama, though he briefly renounced women following Mama’s tragic fall to consumption. Maka has learned to come to terms with her father’s philandering ways, even as she vowed never to trust men.

* * *

“I lived in that house,” Maka tells Soul musingly, after the latter mentions his current place of residence. “I drew a charcoal angel in the downstairs bedroom, just under the windowsill. I wonder if it is still there.”

Soul smiles gently at her. “I will be sure to look for it,” he promises.

She smiles back, melancholic. Much, much later, Soul remembers that her mother fell ill, and would have been bedridden.

* * *

“I still don’t know how to work out a poem.”

Maka’s face turns thoughtful. “A poem,” she begins hesitantly. “A poem needs understanding through the senses.” Her words are slow and deliberate. “The point,” she tells him, “of diving into a lake,” she continues, “is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to… luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, rather, it is an experience beyond thought.” She tilts her head to him, and her eyes glow with moonbeams. “Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”

He finds himself lost in her words and her lips, entranced, enchanted.

The spell breaks with her sheepish laughter. “I imagine your music is much the same, and yet I cannot fathom the meanings behind the notes any more than you claim to understand poetry.”

Soul smiles with her, and they lapse into a comfortable silence. It’s in thinking about his latest piece (a demon’s waltz, he has called it with no small amount of bitterness) that he remembers: “I found your angel under the windowsill.”

“You could make her out?”

“She carries a scythe,” Soul recalls, fondly baffled by the incongruity.

* * *

They come to love one another the night before they part. The day after, Maka kisses his forehead and promises to write as she departs for her travels; in the months that follow, Soul pores over her letters on the porch of his little cottage, drinking in her poetry and pining for her presence.

 _My dearest Ms Albarn_ , he writes back, _Do you know how your absence tortures me? How your script afflicts me with such waves of affection? How is it, my dear, that you have such mastery over the craft of beauty that I sigh at its construction, yet so little skill of its presentation that I laugh to imagine your voice with your words? Ah, but this quirk of yours makes me ever fonder of you, and wish all the more for your swift return._

 _My good sir Evans,_ the next letter reads, _How is it you soothe my soul even after provoking it so? For what little the ink is worth, I, too, regret my time away from you, much as I may enjoy my travels. I dream nightly of flying to you, a sparrow on the wind: we meet halfway and dance together. Alas, the mornings are cruel for tearing me from even your imagined presence. I can only offer you this feather, which I found on my morning walk, and hope it might brighten your thoughts of me._

 _I have started a collection of feathers, beginning with your own,_ he writes back. _Did you know that it takes the precise shade of your eyes when the light casts on it just so? I wonder if you are not tormenting me with its likeness. Wes is indulging my newfound hobby: we spend afternoons together cleaning and sorting through them. I admit, I’ve dreamed of fashioning them into wings that I may fly to meet you. Until we do, I can only offer this cardinal’s feather, the brightest by far of my collection._

 _Ah, sir,_ her next letter sighs, _I wonder if you understand poetry more than you think._

* * *

His parents visit while he is out, and Soul returns to feathers scattered all across his front porch.

His father disapproves of the clutter. His mother frets of disease. Soul rescues as many as he dares, but Maka’s gift is lost.

She seems to understand. Her next letter arrives with another feather, _perhaps not as brilliant as the last, that true marvel of nature; but to ease your guilt and offer solace. Know, my dear, that I am convinced of your innocence, and regret that your parents seem to have forgotten romance._

* * *

The letters wane. Soul wastes as the interims between her letters grow ever longer, reduced to a trickle. He worries, every time, that perhaps he has overstepped his bounds: and yet, every time, her words reaffirm their courtship.

He hears of her affliction secondhand, from Blake’s wife, who sends a letter demanding Soul’s presence. _She has not traveled for weeks,_ the woman writes. _She does not wish for you to know, for she fears that you will see her as a woman, weak and mewling, as she complains that Blake has, but there are things you must know. Forgive again my presumption in sending you this letter: I could only stand aside no longer._

He rides to her the day he reads the letter and arrives on Blake’s doorstep the morning after.

When he steps into the room with its drawn curtains and bedridden occupant, he hears Maka whisper, “Why are you here?”

He kneels before the bed, clasping a clammy hand in his own. On the bedstand beside him, a cardinal’s feather flutters with his motions, but is held firmly in place by a paperweight. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, sadly.

“I was so scared, Soul,” she replies, but her eyes are dry as they drink him in. “I had to give her away.”

“Who?”

“I was so scared,” she repeats. Her eyes flicker. “Is this a dream? I don’t want to wake.”

Soul presses his lips to her fingers. “You aren’t dreaming,” he promises hoarsely.

“My melody,” she sighs. “Would you have loved her? Soul?”

“Loved who?”

“Melody,” she repeats. “She was ours.”

* * *

“Don’t tell me you got the child from the Albarn girl?” Missus Evans complains. “Where is the hussy, anyway? She should be caring for Melody, not you. That’s what we women are for.”

So she says, but Soul has no doubt that if Maka had not passed the month prior, the two women would be at one another’s throat. Maka wouldn’t care for Melody in the same way Soul’s mother dotes on the girl, he knows: Maka would have kissed Soul’s forehead and Melody’s cheek and disappeared for weeks and months and come home to her child and her child’s father and loved them all the more for seeing them so little.

So Soul tells his mother, “You wanted a grandchild.”

“Yes,” Missus Evans sighs. “So I did. So I do! And what a sweetheart Melody is, not like her mother.”

Exactly like her mother, Soul wants to tell his mother: exactly as sweet and as strong as her mother, and time proves him correct. Just as her mother had, Melody scraps with men, and studies medicine with men, and writes poetry like men.

Unlike her mother, Melody Albarn survives consumption.

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimed quote: "A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to… luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, rather, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."
> 
> "You could make her out?" is also a direct quote, but it's not nearly as pretty as the first. :')


End file.
